Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink Read Online Free PDF Page B

Valuing Lives
     
    There are as many ways of valuing lives as there are kinds of values. A life may be morally valuable, aesthetically valuable, intellectually valuable, historically valuable, and so on. For any such value, we can say with a straight face that one leads a “good” or “bad” life; that is, good or bad relative to whatever value we mean when we make the judgment. Sometimes these evaluations overlap. Mother Teresa, for instance, lived a morally and historically significant (that is, good) life.While these values are distinct, the fact that they often overlap and the fact that we use the same evaluative terms for each (good, bad, and so forth) creates ambiguity.This ambiguity is responsible, we think, for the concern that the porn industry propagates poor quality of life. It is based on confusing, once again, the moral quality of one’s life with one’s welfare.
     
    What exactly distinguishes moral quality of life from prudential wellbeing? When we are talking about the welfare, or wellbeing, of an individual we mean roughly how well or ill that person’s life is going. There must be someone whose life is going well, and furthermore, that person must be able to recognize that it is so. Prudential value is the value of your life from
your
perspective; there is an essentially subjective element to welfare. What constitutes welfare varies from person to person, so Dylan’s beliefs about what makes her life worthwhile could radically differ from Dave’s. For example, Dylan may think her life is better off because of her ability to swim, exercise, or have sex for a living, while Dave finds satisfaction in teaching. If Dave tells us that teaching contributes to his life being “good,” or worthwhile, he is not saying at the same time that we all ought to teach and attain that good. Given the subjective nature of welfare, it also seems that the person best positioned to
make
welfare judgments is the individual whose life is in question. Dylan is the best judge of how Dylan’s life is going, in other words.
     
    Morality, if it is worth its salt, is not “optional” in the way our welfare seem to be. Morality and its dictates seem to be universal and not purely contingent on our subjective mental states; that is, if there are moral rules Dave ought to follow or character traits that Dylan ought to develop, then so ought everyone else. Judgments about the moral standing of one’s life, then, need not involve reference to anything subjective. Judging the wickedness of Hitler or Dahmer does not depend at all on whether
they
thought what they were doing was wrong, in other words. It is perfectly possible that one could fail to recognize a diminished or increased moral quality of life. But this, we suggest, is
not
true with one’s own welfare, precisely because what constitutes one’s welfare
depends upon
one’s own subjective viewpoint. 4 The two ways of judging the “quality of one’s life” are distinct, and thus it is possible that one could have a low moral life-value and high welfare, or vice versa.
     
    If we are right, then we have advanced our claim that even if the porn business is immoral and subjects its employees to moral harms, it does not follow that the particular porn performer’s wellbeing is necessarily diminished.
     
    “Not so fast, my friend,” Lee Corso might exclaim at this point.“There is an objection to your view that you have not considered.” That is true. So, in the next section, we will consider some important objections to our argument and attempt to show that they fall short of the mark.
     
    Climax: Happy Slaves, Oppression, and Quality of Life
     
    Suppose we were to consider the lot of a slave. What would we think when we considered her life? Most of us, when asked if that slave had a high quality of life, would think that she endures the
worst
kind of life. The slave is oppressed, compelled to work against her will, and enjoys very little opportunity for